For the 1.9 trillionth time!


It's always nice to know that somebody is trying to help us turn macro-government into something we can really call "useful" in our daily lives. The AP is noted for this when it tries to explain just exactly "what is" a zillion or a billion or a trillion. It usually comes in the number of football fields that it would cover.

Not that you can envision ... say, 100 football fields all in a group.

The latest is exactly "what is" 1.9 trillion dollars.

AP uses these comparisons, as if miles and dollars somehow connect to the rampant insecurity that guides the average journalist these days.

* A 1.9 trillion-mile trip is about the same as 8 million trips to the moon. Since you and I have often been to the moon, consider making 8 million of them and you come up with ...

* 1.9 trillion feet would take you to the top of 29,000-foot Mount Everest 65 million times, or to the bottom of the 36,000-foot Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the Pacific, about 53 million times. Again, been there, done that ... so I can relate.

What does it buy, you ask? Let's get real here.

OK, AP says we can get 422 Nimitz Class aircraft carriers, lots and lots of money for school and ... if time counts, 1.9 trillion seconds adds up to about 60,000 years. AP says that was about 1.9 trillion hours ago -- 220 million years -- dinosaurs were just beginning to dominate the Earth.

About that time, somebody should have alerted AP that these comparisons are a waste of it.

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